Celia Hayes – The Accidental Texan

Candidly, the current state of the world and the latest news such a depressing f**king place, that the Daughter Unit and I have taken refuge in renovating the den, which is our TV watching room. A leak in the ceiling from an overflowing drip pan during the week that Wee Jamie was born resulted in part of the ceiling to that room falling in – and it’s taken a bit of time to clear up the mess, although the HVAC company whose’ unit was responsible for the overflow which caused the initial collapse were troopers and cleared away the mess and roughly patched the hole in the ceiling straight away. It turned out, though – that the deductible on my homeowners’ insurance was pretty high – to the point where the insurance adjuster and I pretty much agreed: take that money and just hire the local neighborhood handy guy to fix the damage – patch the ceiling and all – and just forget about filing a claim.

So that is what we have done – painted the walls with the half-bucket of pale gray-blue paint left over from the nursery, repainted the three bookcases with ice-white paint and moved out the armoire which took up altogether too much space in a small room. This very week we began watching TV there of an evening, with a newly-bottle-fed and bathed Wee Jamie in a small rocking cradle between us. Alas, until I have another client, or the sales of books absolutely skyrockets in the next month or two, actual replacement of the lamentably pop-corn textured ceiling with beadboard and the painted concrete floor with vinyl planks will have to wait. In the meantime, we’ve reclaimed the den for TV watching – and what did we find when we checked into BritBox to see what was on offer? Nothing more awesome than Blake’s 7, which was the British equivalent to the first Star Trek series, at a slightly later time period. This series aired on KUED in Salt Lake City, late on Saturday evenings, and which we discovered and watched slavishly – it followed, IIRC, an episode of Red Dwarf weekly. We loved them both, and I taped the whole run of Blake on VHS tapes, which I still have, and will maintain as long as the series remains stubbornly unavailable for a reasonable cost in a format watchable in the US. I even had a Blake’s 7 T-shirt, a gimme from KUED’s annual pledge drive, a shirt which I wish that I had taken better care of, for the nerd-credit that possessing such an item would presently afford me.

“Sets made of cardboard and plastic sheeting. Costumes borrowed from other shows. Shooting on gravel pits and the like. Each episode made for maybe three quid…” So goes one review on the packaged DVD set available on Amazon. Yep, those were the production values all right – I think that my high school drama classes might have made something higher-grade, overall … at least we might have spent twenty or twenty-five bucks. Only the early Doctor Who episodes boasted even lower-rent special effects, as I recall one which supposedly represented some kind of alien entity, consisting of a long sheet of lightweight plastic shower curtain agitated by an off-camera electric fan. Even the original Star Trek boasted more convincing set dressings and costumes, which is saying something indeed.

But against all those production and special effects shortcomings was a bravura cast of actors, plating interesting and flawed human or humanish characters, and some really excellent writing. There were no happy endings, and certainly no redshirts bumped off in each episode while the main characters emerged unscathed at the end of every episode and season. (One character, Ker Avon, in refusing to go planet-side: “I’m not stupid, I’m not expendable, and I’m not going!) In fact, by the end of three seasons, half the starting characters had been redshirted, and their technologically superior spaceship was gone, and the leader, Blake himself, went missing for all of the final season, until the very end. There was really noting quite to equal it on American TV until Babylon 5. Dystopic, dramatic, and engaging … and an improvement on watching the current news.

Being retired (from the military as of 1997) and from much of anything else involving putting on a skirt suit, pantyhose, low heels and modest makeup in the last three or four years, the Wuhan Coronavirus lockdown really has not impacted my own life much. My daughter’s work and what there is of mine has been home office based for the last four or five years, so sheltering in place has not been much impact on our day to day life. We count this as our good fortune, while realizing to our sorrow that many others in our community are not so fortunately situated.

Up at half-past six, earlier if Larry Bird is creating outside the back yard windows, a leisurely mug of strong tea, while scrolling through various favored websites for a view of what fresh hells await, then a walk with the dogs – our own terrier-mix Nemo, and Penny, the labradoodle who belongs to an elderly neighbor. (One of those upon whom we are keeping a careful eye, as a fragile cancer-survivor.) A very brisk walk through the tangled streets of our subdivision – alas, we were once given to go to the nearest Planet Fitness three times weekly for an hour mostly spent on the elliptical, but they closed at mid-month, so the strenuous walk must substitute. The dogs are getting rather resentful at this program: “Oh, hell, aren’t we done yet?!!” practically appears in thought-bubbles over their heads during the last half-mile or so.

Back to the house: usually a bit of house-cleaning or gardening – the spring has been quite splendid, almost unnoticed. The trees are lavishly green, the bulbs planted in the fall and winter are now producing flowers, the tomato starts that I bought on sale in the fall and sheltered through the couple of chill spells have already produced tomatoes, the pole beans planted a week or so ago are beginning to leap up the frames positioned for their benefit. We were planning on replacing the chicken house this spring, and refreshing the small flock of laying hens, which has been reduced to a single semi-productive hen, but it looks like the current pandemic emergency has caused a run on supplies of chicks and hens. So – next year, I think. In the meantime, an egg every other day or so.

An hour or two (or more) at the sewing machine in the den – I’m doing fabric masks, from a pattern on the Joanne’s Fabrics website. It seems that local clinics, hospitals and medical practices are in crying need of them, so I am going through my cotton muslin fabric scrap stash. It’s not as easy going as I would like – the cranky Brother machine that my daughter bought on the installment plan is a temperamental beast, and after re-threading a couple of times and breaking at least one needle, my patience is at an end. My rule – after doing a fair amount of stitching for Matilda’s Portmanteau – is that after I break two needles, I’m done for the day. I have a pattern scanned from a neighbor’s pattern stash for doing surgical caps, which I am given to understand are also needed badly by a local clinic. The Daughter Unit also posted eight of them to my sister in California: she supervises the care of Mom, and needs three masks for her husband and son, and five for the home-care nurses to regularly visit to help with Mom, who is paralyzed from the shoulders down, but otherwise in good shape.

We went out to Walmart Thursday morning for fabric for this new project and another packet of needles. They are apparently going big on social distancing; in the foyer, I was upbraided by a manger for not remaining six feet or more from my daughter as she procured and sanitized a cart. “It’s the city rule!” she protested, when I pointed out that we are related, live together, and arrived in the same car, seated considerably less than six feet apart. Sigh. There are rules; sensible ones, and then the other kind – the variety that authority freaks seem to get off on enforcing. I hold the city authority freaks responsible for this one, not the manager, who in the matter of providing essential products to the public, likely has challenges that I can only imagine in my worst nightmare. (My regular nightmares are epic… last night I had two of the them in a row: “The Radio Station Which Doesn’t Work” in which I try to do live radio from a studio in which nothing works or is in the right place, followed by “I Can’t Find My Car” – in which I wander about endless parking lots around a campus of some kind, trying to find my car, or even remember where exactly I left it. Yeah, I must be stressed or something. The Daughter Unit blames the Walmart manager for this…)

Break for lunch – usually something left over from supper the night before, or a toasted sandwich. Then on to writing, for a couple of hours in the afternoon. I am staggering along on Luna City #9, at a pause on That Fateful Lightening, not that this should worry my half-a dozen fans. Both Quivera Trail and The Golden Road stood half-completed for months, or even years Break for supper around 5 PM. An hour or so of watching something on streaming video – this week our choice has alighted on episodes of “The Good Karma Hospital” – which is agreeable, has scenic backgrounds (filmed on location in Sri Lanka, which used to be known as Ceylon) and deals with mostly solvable medical dilemmas and soap operas teases of an emotional sort. Read in bed for an hour or so after that, attended on one side by Nemo the Terrier (who appears in The Golden Road as Nipper) and on the other by Mom’s former cat, Isabelle the Not-Tightly-Wrapped-Siamese, who has Issues. Don’t we all, these days?

We finished taking down the Christmas tree and the holiday ornaments over the weekend, and having gotten into an organizing mood, we decided that it was time to tackle two more household locations in series need to a good reorganizing; the spice cupboard, and the pantry. The pantry is a tall cupboard about the size of an old-fashioned phone booth. A couple of years ago we ripped out the original wooden shelves – which were deep and impractical – and put in narrow wire shelving all along the back, up to the very ceiling, and even narrower wire shelving along the sides, and on the back of the door. This let us be a good bit more organized with the staples, canned and packaged goods, but … well, it had gotten to the point where we couldn’t find anything, or we had three or four containers of stuff because we bought more when we couldn’t find it. I mean, really – four packages of fajita seasoning, and three of celery salt? And to our hideous shame and embarrassment, some of the packaged mixes, for bread, cakes and frosting were more than four years past their ‘best by’ dates. Bread mixes definitely lose their mojo very shortly after their expiration date; this we know for certain, through experience. And there were some home-canned items that … we just couldn’t. They were on a high shelf at the back, and I didn’t even want to salvage the jars, the contents looked so nasty.

Set to work on the spice cupboard, first; helped by a set of 12 4-ounce lidded spice jars gotten through Amazon Vine for review. The set came with a small collapsing funnel, as an extra. Sorted, amalgamated, repacked, and a half dozen jars of spices actually thrown away – I mean, I could not remember how long ago I bought that little jar of dried fennel; not that I needed it any more as I have a large fresh fennel plant going great guns in the garden. And the powdered horseradish root absolutely has to be something that I packed in the last move. In 1994. (A couple of years ago I found a jar of Spanish saffron on the shelves. From Alcampo, the Spanish equivalent of Walmart. We rotated out of Spain at the end of 1991…)

And then to the pantry, which went rather faster than I had expected – but oh, my – there was a lot of stuff in there. A nice portion of the more-than-time-expired baking mixes went straight to the trash; the Daughter Unit and I felt rather bad about that. All those news stories about how Americans (or whatever) throw away so many pounds of food – eleventy!!! Well, we threw away our yearly share in one fell swoop, but honestly – most of the packages and jars had best-by dates of at least four years ago and were purchased from the ‘severely marked-down’ shelves at HEB … and if we hadn’t gotten around to using them in the last four years, then the odds were that we would never do; why prolong the agony? There went three or four bottles of cooking sauces, and a Fisher & Wieser blueberry sauce that we had never found anything to do with, and otherwise we love Fisher & Wieser; all the other F&W products were reprieved, and the Daughter Unit sorted them into ‘marinades/sauces’ and ‘salad dressing’ categories on the shelf. At the end of this exercise, we had a bit more shelf-space (enough for the eight-pack of canned diced tomatoes from Costco) and the Daughter’s stash of exotic teas and her favored brand of coffee. With luck, we might actually be able to find stuff in the pantry … and the Daughter Unit has sternly warned me to consider what we might have in the pantry when planning the menus over the next couple of months.